


teach your man to fish

by silentwalrus



Series: barnacle boy [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, Lustful Thoughts for Sam Wilson, M/M, Original Canadian Character, Park Rangers Don't Get Paid Enough, Selkies, The Molt, selkie bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Bucky doesn’t deign to stay in Stark Tower for much longer than it takes to completely clean out the kitchens’ fish supply. After slurping down the last oyster and sneering in disgust at the contents of the walk-in freezer, Bucky turns to Steve, pelt over his shoulder, and says, “Where do you live?”Podficavailable by the magnificent Quietnight!





	teach your man to fish

**Author's Note:**

> This work includes requests from those who donated to Swing Left in exchange for topic + wordcount! Thank you so much, all! People like you make the world go round. 
> 
> and now... FAT SEAL BUCKY

 

Bucky doesn’t deign to stay in Stark Tower for much longer than it takes to completely clean out the kitchens’ fish supply. After slurping down the last oyster and sneering in disgust at the contents of the walk-in freezer, Bucky turns to Steve, pelt over his shoulder, and says, “Where do you live?”

“Uh,” Steve says, suddenly put face first against the fact that the answer is currently “nowhere”.

“I’d say you could stay with me,” Sam says, from where he’s slumped at one of the kitchen prep tables, “But my bathtub could not take the abuse.”

“Also it’s in DC,” Steve says, to Bucky. “Unless you want to go to DC? Or… anywhere,” he trails off lamely. Bucky had always loved New York, but maybe his feelings had changed at some point in the last century.

“Do you need money?” Bucky says.

“What?”

“Money. I have a lot,” Bucky says, wiping unspeakable fluids from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You still use it, right? Is there something else now?”

“No, money’s still a thing,” Steve says. “It’s - no, Buck, I got money. Thanks, though.”

Sam has slowly raised his head from the table. “How do _you_ have money, Barnes?”

Bucky looks at him, eyebrows furrowed. “Hydra kept lots,” he says. “And I killed them all, so it’s mine now. Should we bury it?”

“Bury it,” Sam repeats.

“We’d have to get it out first, it’s all…” Bucky makes a disgusted face and waves a hand. “In banks.”

“You know what,” Sam says. “Why don’t I introduce you to the wonderful world of charitable donation.”

“Good idea,” Steve says. His first month out of the ice he’d dropped a hefty chunk of his backpay into Alzheimer’s research for Peggy, and after that had half his SHIELD salary go to the Marine Life Conservation Society every month. They’d send him little whale and dolphin and polar bear thank you cards in the mail. He has a stack of them now. _That_ he’ll have to go and dig out of the DC apartment. Maybe Bucky will like them. They’re beautifully photographed and quite colorful, but Steve hadn’t done anything with them, for obvious reasons. He suspects looking at them now won’t upset him anymore, though.

“First we need a house,” Bucky says, swinging his head back to Steve. “You said. With a big bath. Close to the water.”  

Steve feels his face do something increasingly mushy even as reality continues to filter in. “I don’t think we’ll find a house with a bath as big as the tower pool,” he says apologetically. “I’m sure Stark would let us stay if we asked, though. I’ve got money, we can make rent.”

Bucky glances around. “This not yours?”

“No,” Steve says.

“The little man with the beard, he’s not yours?”

Steve can only pray that JARVIS isn’t right now relaying Buck’s description back to Tony. “No,” Steve says. “No, Tony, he’s... a colleague, I guess.”

“Colleague,” Bucky repeats, and Steve can _see_ him updating his mental definition of _colleague: human who owns tower full of food in Midtown._ Then he jerks his head towards _Sam._ “You with him?”

There is nothing Steve can do about the blush that explodes across his face except maybe leap out the window, and he definitely considers it. “No,” he says.

 _“Oh_ my god,” Sam says.

Bucky ignores them both and tugs a strand of his own matted hair, holding it up to show Steve. “The red girl?”

“No.” Steve shakes his head, no longer capable of looking at Sam. “Nobody, right now.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. He’d been over the moon when he’d met Peggy. He’d thought Steve’s new body was the result of Steve _finally_ seeing the sense in Bucky’s crusade to get Steve to try to attract girls.  Steve, who had done extensive reading on seals, had been more than a little worried that Bucky seemed intent on building Steve a harem, not least because Bucky is _male,_ and in those situations male seals usually fight each other.

Then again, selkies aren’t actually seals, and Buck is pretty queer anyhow.

“Am I seeing what I’m seeing right now,” Sam says. “Barnes, are you _upset_ that he hasn’t been sleeping around?”

Bucky sniffs, turning away pointedly. “Selkies live communally,” Steve manages, trying not to sound guilty or embarrassed or like he’s trying to talk around the sentence ‘Winter Soldier business or no, Bucky’s life goal is apparently still to turn me into some kind of philandering Lothario’. Steve wants to say splashing Tony and stealing his donut was definitely not courting behavior, and neither was terrorizing Sam, but Buck’s also a little scrambled and Steve can’t be sure. In this kind of situation, Steve _really would prefer to be sure._

“Come on, Buck,” he says instead. “We can stay at a hotel while we decide about the house. Thank you for helping us, Sam,” and Sam waves them on, bemused, as Bucky wraps his pelt around himself and follows Steve to the door.

-o-

Steve checks them into the Plaza. When they get to their suite Bucky goes over the room and explores and then comes back and rubs his mouth on Steve’s cheek, so Steve picks up the phone and says things like _extra sauce please_ and _double portion_ and _fatty tuna_. Steve will always feed him.

Bucky goes to explore some more. It’s strange to be on two legs again after a month straight in his skin, but there are upsides. More options. Color vision. Hands. Things taste better in his human mouth and there’s more to eat on land besides.

He was pleased to discover Steve is still King here in the future. It’s not that he ever _doubted,_ it’s just that things happen and there was a long, long inbetween time for them to happen in. He didn’t like belonging to another pod, in the underworld where he had no skin. All their Kings were fucking awful. He was still favorite there but it wasn’t good at all. Better than worst is still bad.

He knows Steve is worried about him and worried that he doesn’t know what to do about it. Bucky doesn’t really know either. In the underworld time was ruined and all the magic was bad. It was like living life caught in a bad current, unable to right yourself or swim free until it spat you out. When they were little Steve had explained to him about Hell and how it didn’t exist really, but Bucky thinks maybe he found it, stumbled in. Humans can’t go there unless they die but maybe for selkies it’s different. And it left grime inside him, like bad water.

He’s out now. It marked him up but he’ll find a way to make it fade, clean it out. A lot of magic seems to be better now. He just needs to find the right spell. And Steve is King.

Steve still _says_ he’s not King and that human society is more complicated than that, but from what Bucky’s seen at the end of the day it isn’t really. Humans have lots of names for King, like President and General and Senator and Captain, but they all mean King in the end. And Steve wins all his fights. Humans listen to him. Almost everyone comes to him smelling interested, even if Steve completely ignores it.

 _That’s_ a problem. Steve occasionally made noises about how he only wants Bucky, but Bucky’s hoping he’s over that or at least will be soon. The Sam situation seems promising. Steve always was nervous around females and late bloomer didn’t even cover it; maybe he’s only working up to it now.

It’s really a shame about Peggy. Bucky knows he’ll always be favorite, but Peggy had been a lot of fun.

Well, if Steve wants to stick to males that’s alright too. The little hairy-faced Colleague has a lot to commend him, even if his voice sounds stupid as hell.

In the meantime, Bucky will just have to be the advert, as usual. He resigned himself to doing the heavy lifting since the first time he brought him Laurel and Kitty and Elle from the sixth grade and Steve just fell all over himself and refused to say words with more than one syllable. Bucky brought him girls for _years_ and it was like Steve wasn’t even _trying._ Bucky tried bringing him boys, too, but only once because _that_ made Steve so upset he wouldn’t talk for a week. Bucky never did figure out what the fuck happened there.

He’s not supposed to bring people to Steve anymore. After Bucky got excited about Peggy and asked about her friends Steve went all red and said please don’t try and get me dates anymore Bucky. But that doesn’t mean he can’t make people want to come close on their own.

Bucky turns his head back and forth, watching his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face isn’t scarred up too bad but he doesn’t look right either. Tangled, unkept. He has a _lot_ of work to do.

At least the Erskine spell is helping him now, even if Steve still refuses to take initiative.

And Steve has the nerve to call _Bucky_ lazy.

-o-

In the apartment inbetweentime, Steve takes them to the Plaza Hotel, figuring it's as good a place as any to stay with Bucky, and when they get upstairs Bucky starts going over the room, looking for surveillance. He’s good at it, too: in recent months Steve got used to watching Natasha toss a lot of hotel rooms and learned a few tricks himself, and now he sees Bucky doing all of it and more. It’s a little feeling of vertigo, like when Steve saw Buck field-strip his rifle for the first time in London. It’s not that he’d never seen a weapon before, or that Bucky is clumsy or slow, it’s just that it was so obvious that he’d done it a thousand times and up until the war Steve had been there for almost all of Bucky’s firsts. He taught Bucky how to peel an orange **.** He taught Bucky how to tie shoelaces. Bucky is by no means stupid but he does tend to approach things a little sideways, and Steve had gotten used to having those moments with him, laughing together and sorting out what’s what.

Buck never cared, though, if whatever little things he did made him seem awkward or strange. Steve’d always wanted to be like that, because, well, it didn’t feel _great_ to be the shortest and the skinniest and the wheeziest and it certainly didn’t make it any better when half the whole world insisted on fucking telling him so. Like they thought he didn’t know, and needed the damn reminders. But Buck just gave people blank looks or unconcerned smiles, or, if they pressed the matter, clocked them one across the jaw with the preoccupied air of a guy getting rid of a not especially bothersome bug. Like he was doing it, for tidiness’ sake, but not as if he’d ever dream of it registering as more than a vague and not particularly urgent bother.

And to Steve, he had the kind of optimism that could be used to fuel stars. Steve suspected if the Sun ever decided it wouldn’t come up one morning, all Bucky would have to do is smile encouragingly at the horizon and the dawn would come sidling in so as not to disappoint. Around every corner was an amazing new experience and Buck couldn’t wait to meet it. He talked like the future was full of rainbows and riches and all they had to do was get there.

Of course, the flip side of that is that once Buck has his mind set it’d take God himself to move him. It’s probably something to do with how he’s a horse-sized seal but a normal-sized human. The attitude must carry over. Bucky’s kind and all, but he also goes through life like a benevolent emperor mingling with his lovable but nonetheless somewhat dim subjects. His convictions are granite in their unshakeability. It had taken a while to impress upon Bucky that Steve was _not_ ‘king’, of _anything_ , only then all that work came undone when Steve showed up as Captain America.

Bucky didn’t see him tapdancing on stage like a circus monkey, or being shipped around by Brandt. Bucky saw people cheering him, and following his orders, and girls and even some damn GIs coming up to him and giving him the eyes. Bucky decided yep, he was king alright, and would not be budged from the notion that Dr. Erskine was a wizard who Steve had tricked into spelling him bigger with “science”.

Bucky says “science” with audible quotation marks. Every time Steve tried to explain that radios or cars or planes weren’t magic, just - engineering, and physics and chemistry and things, Bucky would listen tolerantly and then carry on behaving like the Howard Starks of the world went around bopping things with magic wands and turning them into rabbits. Granted, it’s not that _Steve_ understood what exactly made a flying car fly, but he’s pretty goddamn sure it’s not magic.

And Bucky thought that about art too, and Steve _definitely_ knows there’s no magic there. It’s just him on his ass swearing at every misstroke and paint drip. It’s his years and years of practice, which _Bucky_ is half responsible for. It was incredibly flattering and more than a little intimidating to have him treat every instance of Steve painting like a once-in-a-lifetime magic show, but Steve would take what he could get. If drawing got him the most beautiful boy in the world staring at him unblinking for literal hours, then by god, he was gonna draw. He wasn’t even gonna make a fuss when he spotted Bucky furtively licking the colored pencils afterward. He had to intervene when Bucky tried to lick paint, but only so he wouldn’t accidentally poison himself.

Two weeks into staying at the Plaza hotel, Steve has similarly had to discourage Bucky from burning himself with the complimentary hair curling iron, eating chocolates with the wrappers still on and licking the soap. Bucky is incorrigible about soap. He’s incorrigible about most things that smell interesting. “But Steve,” he says plaintively, “They put the mask on me because I wouldn’t stop putting things in my mouth,” and Steve has to look to God himself for strength in these times of trial.

“While that was wrong, of them, to do,” Steve struggles out, “You’re still gonna poison yourself if you eat that air freshener. Just - just sniff it. I promise it doesn’t taste good.”

“Not gonna _poison myself,”_ Bucky mutters, but he does put it down. He seems to have reset on some aspects of human culture and forgotten that he can get Steve to do things without outright manipulation, so Steve has to be a little more literal these days.

“If you’re hungry then let’s go eat,” Steve says, because sometimes the best way to handle this is pretend he’s dealing with an armed three year old. “Come on. Let’s get dressed. We need to pick up Tony his present anyway.”

“Then oyster bar?” Bucky says hopefully, levering himself up from the floor and somehow leaving the bathrobe down there without actually seeming to take it off. Bucky’s sartorial abilities are the real magic, though Steve supposes a bathrobe is nothing when you quite literally skin yourself on the regular.

“Then oyster bar,” Steve agrees. The oyster bar loves them. A lot of restaurants don’t. The oyster bar, however, thinks they’re the neatest thing since sliced bread. The guy behind the bar will occasionally put his chin on his folded arms and sigh, watching Bucky plow through plate after plate of oysters like a threshing machine with a seafood quota. Though lately Steve has started to suspect that has more to do with Bucky’s extremely tailored outfits than any appreciation for hearty eating.

The manager was more than happy to give them a giant plastic bag of discarded oyster shells for free, though.

They have to go downtown to pick up Tony’s present. Tony’s present - which has been getting framed and shellacked within an inch of its life for the past week - is a portrait of him and Miss Potts. Bucky spent an afternoon picking mother-of-pearl shards out of the oyster shells with his black claws and Steve used them as an inlay for the eyes and highlights and arc reactor. It had felt good to do something together, not least because Buck sat next to Steve just as rapt as he ever had, watching him move paint around. As always, Steve offered Bucky the brush, and as always he’d shaken his head and nudged Steve to start back up again.

They’d gone to the Met together, before the war, and some Cooper Union student shows, but Buck didn’t seem nearly as interested in looking at art as the process of making it. Steve’s glad he could show Buck the internet now, even if that meant immediately losing Bucky to calligraphy videos for six straight hours.

It’s a trip back uptown to the Tower. Bucky spends the time carefully reading each subway ad while absentmindedly dragging the zipper up and down on Steve’s hoodie. When he’s done reading ads he starts staring at other passengers. Some stare back, but never for long; a lot of people look away and blush. Steve understands. Girls practically swallow their tongues when Buck walks past, and the only difference now in 2015 is that Steve sees some men doing it too. Granted, these days they might just be wondering how in god’s name that much glitter fits in that kind of square footage, but Steve suspects it’s not that.

They make it to the Tower. Jarvis directs them to one of the residential floors, where Tony turns around from the bar and double takes. _“Jesus_ you look different,” he says.

Steve can’t argue. Bucky, who in two short weeks has gotten a haircut, established a wardrobe and gotten pierced to kingdom come, does indeed look like a completely different person from before. He’s still gaunt and his human skin is sickly pale, but given the constant eating Steve has high hopes that he’ll gain the weight back soon. In the meantime he seems to be compensating with clothes. Today it’s a silvery waistcoat, copper lamé tie, white linen sleeves rolled up and bracelets on both arms halfway to the elbow. Bucky used to leave his pelt at his mom’s or at Steve’s place, but now he doesn’t really put it down, so these days it does double duty as a fashion item. Today it’s a kilt that goes all the way to the floor.

He’s still armed under there, of course. All the knives have been carefully chosen to match: silver only. Bucky had spent all last week arranging his weapons by shine and color. It’s only a matter of time before Steve finds him trying to gold-plate his Glock.

“Very… wow,” Tony continues, taking all this in. “Very… shiny. Very bangles.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says politely. “You like them? You can have one.” He tugs one bangle off and holds it out.

“Nnnnooo, no thank you,” Tony says. “I don’t really get handed things and I, uh, wouldn’t want you to mess up your - symmetry.”

“Alright,” Bucky says equably, sticking his hand back through the bangle. “But we’re here to give you a gift anyway.”

“Oh, god,” Tony says. “Is this some kind of selkie magic blood bargain? Do I need my lawyer? Please don’t give me anything that’ll bind me to you or the ocean or the light of the full moon.”

“No,” Bucky says, puzzled. “Steve says it’s polite.”

Tony needn’t have worried. Selkie manners are mostly about sexual access and beach territory. “Thank you for helping us, Tony,” Steve says aloud. “This is for you and Miss Potts. Please thank her for letting us stay in her tower.”

He sets the portrait on the counter, opening up the foam wrapping so Tony can see. Steve had drawn them facing each other from the shoulders up, smiling, their heads tilted together and almost touching. He’d seen Tony and Miss Potts talking together just like that once, in a corner after some Battle of Manhattan SHIELD thing, and they’d both looked down and smiled at their own feet and neither of them looked like ruthless billionaire egomaniacs, just for a second. It had seemed like a nice moment.

Tony’s still staring. Bucky, who is now prodding at the digital display on the refrigerator, glances around and then gives Steve a look that says _Is the little hairy one okay?_ Steve waves it off. Tony probably wouldn’t appreciate more of an audience right now. Bucky nods, pulls a knife from under his pelt and starts using the tip to pry the digital panel out of the casing.

Tony takes a couple of slow steps forward but continues to stare in silence. There’s a _ping_ as Bucky gets a screw loose and sends it flying across the kitchen. “We’ve got to go,” Steve says, making a tactical decision in light of Tony’s emotional catatonia and Bucky’s impending vandalism. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you, Tony. C’mon, Buck, there’s a specialty restaurant just down the block, it says they sell swordfish.”

Bucky stops mauling the fridge immediately and trots straight to the elevator. Steve hustles them out of there before Tony arrives at whatever internal destination he’s careening towards or Bucky spots something else he can get his teeth into.

The restaurant down the block is nearly empty at this hour, which means the waiters all end up clustered across the room near the till, watching with round eyes. Steve always tips like a lunatic, because he understands it can be a psychological strain to watch an extremely dapper gentleman use his teeth to rip the tail off a lobster or go face down in a plate of calamari.

And there’s a _lot_ of variety these days, enough to impress even Bucky, who will eat things out of the water that Steve is pretty sure not even bugs would call food. There’s _sea cucumber_ on this menu, even if is thirty dollars for a chunk half the size of Bucky’s hand. Bucky made Steve order it, swallowed it whole, chased it with a swig of vinegar and declared it overcooked. That happens a lot. A lot of times what Buck considers “overcooked” is just “cooked at all.”

Despite the miraculous variety of modern seafood restaurants, however, they do not serve Bucky’s El Dorado.

“They serve everything _else,”_ he complains, cracking a massive crab leg in half with a vicious snap. “They’ll gimme seaweed. They’ll gimme swordfish! But they won’t gimme penguin. I thought this was _New fuckin’ York.”_

“I think there’s some kind of regulations about what you can serve as meat,” Steve says. He reaches over and smooths a thumb over Buck’s eyebrow, incidentally removing a piece of crab shrapnel. He’s found he can’t give a shit about who sees him touching Bucky in public anymore, which is helpful when Buck is up to his ears in something with a blast radius and needs the extra hand. “And I think penguins are endangered, so we probably shouldn’t be eating them.”

“It can’t hurt if I only eat _one,”_ Bucky says, through a mouthful of crab. Bucky, Steve knows, has never eaten penguin. He’s always _wanted_ to, ever since his second cousin from somewhere down in the Chilean archipelago came up to visit and told them about the tasty tuxedo water birds, but he has yet to get the chance. Steve may or may not be planning a trip to South America for Bucky’s birthday.

“Probably the population can spare one,” Steve allows, reaching over again and pouring the little hot butter dish all over the remaining crab meat; Buck needs the calories. Personally Steve couldn’t give less of a damn about whether one penguin ends up as lunch or one hundred, but he also knows about the current state of the environment. The way Bucky puts away half his body mass as a daily requirement would likely render Bucky’s culinary endeavors unsustainable.

Steve sighs. Maybe Bucky will think penguin tastes disgusting. That’s got about a snowflake’s chance in a Saharan August, but a man can dream. Steve really doesn’t think it’ll look great in the news if Captain America ends up having to fund some kind of breeding program.

-o-

Steve is half worried and half relieved that Buck shows no interest in talking about anything that isn’t food, fashion, or how to navigate the two in 2015. He wants Buck to know he _can_ talk, that Steve will listen, but he also doesn’t want to set any demands or pry into anything painful. He’s not really sure how to indicate that besides just helping Bucky get what he wants.

Steve knows it’s changed him. Two days ago a waiter reached over Buck’s shoulder for a plate and Buck had him by the arm faster than thought, teeth bared, even if he let go right after. Steve had apologized for them and doubled the tip, but Bucky was twitchy the whole meal after and didn’t even finish his third halibut. It’s not the only symptom. He doesn’t talk to strangers anymore. He deals with Steve half the time like he’s an unpredictable force of nature that has to be worked around and appeased, though less so as time goes on. And Bucky sleeps in the bed, but only in his halfway shape or with his pelt wrapped around him like a straightjacket.

Steve doesn’t really know how to help. Bucky prided himself on his ability to pass, but any conversation lasting longer than twenty minutes inevitably revealed that he was a couple of wide steps to the left of human normal. He hung on in the war with a kind of grim, stubborn pride: he said he could handle the human world and he would. Steve wants to punch through a wall every time he thinks about it. Buck was always so eager, so happy to discover and learn about and do human things, and this is what humans handed him.

On the other hand, considering some of the stories Buck’s told him, it’s not that much worse than what the animals get up to. “Routinely eating your own children” is not typically a situation that crops up in most human society. Animals don’t try to systematically destroy each other, but at least humans are a little less casual about the cross-species necrophilia. (Steve has not been able to look at ducks the same way since.)

But Bucky seems - very well off, all things considered. Maybe the month as a seal had been more therapeutic than Steve realized. Bucky had told Steve before that thinking felt different as a seal, and feeling too. Bucky had tried to describe it a couple times, badly, and mostly what Steve got was that everything seems both more and less important, and emotions are both sharper and duller, and the past feels more like the past.

So Buck is quieter, and less adventurous in dragging Steve to new places, new stores, but overall his resilience seems to have won out. Steve doesn’t know who or what or how to thank for Bucky, alive, talking, smiling, eating, but every day he’s grateful, grateful, grateful.

And some days Steve enters the bedroom to find a big sad lump trying to pull blankets over itself with its flippers. As hilarious as it is to watch Bucky waggle forlornly at the air in an attempt to gain traction, he only does this when whatever he’s feeling is too much to handle for his human shape.

Steve lies down next to him and scratches gently at the join of Buck’s flipper, where he gets itchy sometimes and can’t reach. With a sensation of tectonic drift Bucky rolls over, slow enough that the mattress springs only give a single protesting squeal. He sticks his damp whiskery nose in Steve’s ear, then gives a despondent little honk and collapses back to the mattress. He heaves a sigh and expands horizontally as he flattens out.

“How about we read something,” Steve offers. He’s always been incapable of standing by when Buck is a sad balloon.

Bucky tootles dejectedly and waves a flipper again. “Okay,” Steve says, climbing up on the bed and putting an arm around Buck. It’s like spooning a boulder in a blanket. A _hot_ boulder, though Steve’s long thought that he would’ve died of pneumonia ten times over were it not for Bucky having a body temperature that makes him steam on wet mornings. As a seal he runs even hotter, and Steve has to surreptitiously kick the covers down to the end of the bed to avoid starting to sweat within three seconds of making contact with him.

Buck gives a single forlorn slap of the tailfin when he feels Steve’s arm go around him and heaves another gale-force sigh. Steve scratches all around his fin and rubs at the vast, velvety acreage of Bucky’s side, pressing a kiss to the closest bit of pelt. When Buck hasn’t been in water he doesn’t really smell like anything but oily animal fur, though Steve could’ve sworn he used to catch the occasional whiff of Brylcreem on Bucky’s pelt. It’s not unpleasant. In any case, Steve’s pretty sure his olfactory receptors have gone completely dead to the smell of fish anyway.

Bucky slowly continues to deflate, giving the occasional feeble waggle of his flipper to bring Steve’s hand back over to scratch again. “If you want to talk, I want to listen,” Steve says quietly, to the slablike back of Bucky’s neck.

Bucky gurgles sadly and tries to roll onto Steve. Steve gives a rather different gurgle of his own before he manages to roll with Bucky, ending up gasping and facing the other way, slumped on top.

Bucky, now buried snout-first into what was formerly Steve’s pillow, loudly protests being denied. “I gotta breathe, sweetheart,” Steve tries to remind him. Bucky’s impulse control really is abominable when he’s flippered. Day one at the Plaza had been spent preventing Bucky from eating the coffee grounds out of the complimentary room package. Day two had been spent in the ensuite bathroom, resetting the jacuzzi timer every time it ran out and watching Bucky rotate blissfully in the spray like a wet rotisserie chicken.

Bucky makes some more noises, but Steve knows the difference between genuine distress and Bucky trying to convey that he is the saddest most woebegone creature in existence, tragically unloved and desperately in need of fish/crab/salami/booze/petting. Steve rubs his side anyway. He already knew he was doomed to giving Bucky whatever he wanted since he was an impressionable ten year old, easily led astray.

It’s enough for Buck, anyway.

Sleeping next to seal Bucky is a little like sharing a bed with a barge, but Steve minds even less now that he’s had to go without it. He listens to Buck subside into wheezy snores and shuts his eyes. They’ll be okay.

Then spring rolls around, and Bucky gets The Itch.

There’s no nice way to put it: Buck is an unmitigated disaster during molt. He gets cranky and despondent, he mopes ferociously, and he loses all appetite and apparent will to live. He has to spend three weeks as a seal, his new skin coming in as the old comes off piece by piece. It’s not pretty. He spends the entire time with his pelt looking like the stuff Steve watched Sam pull out of his jammed vacuum cleaner.

And in the week leading up to D-Day some of it translates over to his human skin, too. What that means is Bucky spends every waking moment trying to scratch himself with anything in reach.

Steve wakes on the twenty-first of February to the mattress shaking like there’s a platoon tapdancing on the bed. Beside him, Bucky is grim-faced and determinedly going at his right flank with Steve’s hairbrush, kidnapped from the nightstand. “Oh no,” Steve says automatically. “Already?”

Bucky makes an evil noise and chucks the brush across the room. Then he burrows into the covers in disgust. Steve has to briefly grab onto the headboard for balance as Bucky tunnels until he’s directly under Steve. “That bad, huh,” Steve says.

Bucky makes a couple of noises like a bulldog trying to blow into a party whistle and flips them around, wrapping his arms around Steve’s head, rubbing his face in Steve’s hair. Steve closes his eyes as he strokes Bucky’s back. He’ll never stop being grateful for Bucky’s unrepentant tactility. Even seventy years of nightmares didn’t seem to slap the hugs out of him. Steve didn’t even know how much he missed being used as a self-propelling teddybear until he got it back.

“How about we rent a nice place on the beach,” Steve murmurs into Bucky’s armpit. The whole Barnes colony used to disappear off to some secluded cove during molt month; Bucky didn’t comprehend geography the same way when he was a seal, but he’d thought it was somewhere in Connecticut. He’d come back at the end of it with twice the usual appetite and pink all over, looking extremely scrubbed, and while Steve has never witnessed a molt from start to finish he knows more or less what it entails. “We’ll bring plenty of food. And this’ll let us catch up on all the movies and books and music we missed, I bet.”

Bucky makes more deeply congested noises and squeezes tighter. Steve rubs his back more, and gives him lots of kisses on whatever body part ends up shoved against his face, and when eventually Bucky drifts off back into sleep Steve rolls out of bed to go find them a place to stay before they head out to become a leper colony of one.

Steve finds them a beachfront house rental on Long Island. Sam sees him googling, and Steve watches _private beach access_ war visibly with _selkie nonsense_ on Sam’s face. In the end the burgeoning spring weather breaks the tie, the promise of sunshine too much to resist after a long winter of horrible sleety storms. A week later Buck has snapped most of the bristles off of Steve’s hairbrush, so they pack up and head out with Sam in tow.

The rental is a pleasant little place about twenty yards from the water, with plenty of deck space and a long wooden walk over the dunes to the actual beach. “Holy _shit,”_ Sam says, the second they step out of the rental car and get hit with a blast of wind that feels like it’s trying to take Steve’s hair off. It’s an unseasonably warm March 1st, but it’s still not exactly high summer. Steve and Sam are both in their track pants, and Steve packed extra towels for them to warm themselves with.

Bucky, however, is in a retina-searing pair of orange swim shorts and nothing else. The second they step off the boardwalk Bucky flings his pelt at Steve, tosses himself down and starts writhing, trying to maximize the sand to skin scrub ratio.

This gives Sam pause. “You okay there, man?”

“It feels,” Bucky says menacingly, flipping from side to side like a landed fish, “like I am covered in _bees.”_

“It’s the molt,” Steve explains, draping the pelt carefully over his arm and stepping onto the sand. “He’s itchy.”

“Go with god, dude,” Sam says, and carefully steps over Bucky’s legs before following Steve.

Steve leads them to a relatively sheltered patch of sand between two rocky outcrops, where the wind is at least only coming from one direction instead of everywhere at once, and sets down their supplies. The rocks on their left extend into the ocean, and once Bucky writhes his way over he pops up and clambers up there. Naturally he finds a tide pool and immediately sticks his face in it.

Sam looks over at Bucky, on all fours with his head underwater, then back at Steve. “Incredible,” he says.

“It really is,” Steve says, spreading out their beach chairs. He tries not ogle how handsome and shining and sleek Sam looks with his shirt off, but it’s a fairly futile task given how Sam is two feet away and applying sunblock _extremely thoroughly._ Steve _knows_ he’s not doing any harm by looking - in fact if Bucky saw he’d throw a party on the spot and somehow produce party hats and streamers from the dunes - but Steve can’t help it, he was raised Catholic, and the bells of monogamy don’t still ring in his head so much as clang. He can’t help but feel he’s being unfaithful to Buck, even as Buck continues to give Steve pointed looks every time someone even remotely attractive crosses their field of vision.

At the moment, though, Bucky’s only seeing whatever magical mysteries can be found in the three-odd feet of water of the tide pool. “Yo Barnes,” Sam calls, probably because Bucky’s been down there for a solid five minutes and Sam probably doesn’t know Buck can handle eight times as long. “You doing okay?”

Bucky jerks his head up out of the pool with animal abruptness and gives Sam a long, piercing look, unimpeded by the water cascading down his chest. He does that now sometimes, moving too fast and like he doesn’t quite have all the right bones. He never would before. Now he doesn’t care who sees that while he might be homo he’s definitely not sapiens.

It makes Steve feel kind of jealous, in a silly, pathetic little way. It used to be a thrill, for him to be in on the Barnes family secret: Bucky liked and trusted and wanted him enough to bring him in. It’s a _really_ stupid feeling, given Steve _knows_ Bucky considers most humans to be a kind of mobile furniture, but it’s there nonetheless.

“Barnes?” Sam repeats, with around thirty percent more trepidation when Bucky just continues staring.

Bucky smiles, wide and toothy. “I’m feeling much better now.”

“Good,” Sam says. “Great. What the hell are you looking for down there?”

Bucky shrugs, shakes his hair off briefly and sticks his head back in. Sam watches him submerge most of his upper shoulders, then come back and start scraping interestedly at the slimy green moss growing on the rocks.

Sam turns back to Steve, settling his towel further over his shoulders. “You ever think about getting him a backpack leash?”

“What for?” Steve says. He doesn’t know what a backpack leash is exactly but he can hazard a guess.

“You’re right. He’d only eat it.” Sam adjusts his sunglasses and settles back in his deck chair. He looks like a James Bond, only handsomer and way less likely to leave you to get shot dead by a villian with an astonishingly stupid name.  “Riddle me this, Cap: he was in the war, right? Did he like… go on aquatic missions?”

Steve blinks. “Well… kinda,” he says. If Buck’s not secretive with this stuff anymore then Steve shouldn’t be either, and besides, it’s Sam. “He left his pelt with his mom when he got drafted, but he can still hold his breath forever and swim like hell. Came in handy a few times.”

“He got _drafted?”_

“Yeah. His whole family lived in Brooklyn,” Steve says. “His dad was human, too. They have birth certificates and everything. Though Buck and all his sisters all lived with his aunts in County Cork up until they were around nine or so, because raising babies as seals is a _lot_ cheaper.”

“Huh,” Sam says. “I guess that’s true. Kids are crazy expensive. That’s pretty smart.” He twists around to look at Bucky again. “Dude, you’re half selkie?”

“All selkie,” Bucky grunts, not looking up. He’s still by the tide pool but is now industriously rubbing his face on a rock. “No such thing as half. Selkies breed true.”

“Whoa,” Sam says. “So like - what, your dad cried seven tears into the ocean, is that it?”

Bucky pauses and gives him a puzzled look. “No? My ma caught him swimming naked and sat on his clothes until he promised her a dance.”

Sam makes a little choking noise. Steve grins. “Mrs. Barnes didn’t tend to wait around for what she wanted.”

“I see her son has inherited her finest qualities,” Sam says. “Christ. Is everything written down about selkies wrong? What about - you mentioned sirens, right? What else did Disney tell us that turned out to be real?”

“Sirens are terrible,” Bucky declares. “All of the cold blooded ones are. And mermaids are just fucking weird.”

They watch Bucky stick his head underwater again. No more appears to be forthcoming. This is probably half due to his attention span and half to the fact that Bucky’s general assumption that he is the authority in every subject occasionally runs up against the fact that he doesn’t know all that much about it. “Mermaids and sirens, huh,” Sam says.

“I’ve only met selkies,” Steve admits. “All I know is what Buck told me. I don’t think _he’s_ met any sirens either, but his ma and his aunts probably have.”

“I did _too_ meet a siren,” Bucky says, jerking up again abruptly enough that his first couple words come out mostly through a mouthful of water. “She was an asshole. She made fun of me when I didn’t have my pelt and _ran away_ when I told her to get out of the water and put up for it. Coward. _Mean.”_

He spits out more water, frowns at it dribbling down his chest and gets back to his tide pool. Steve knows from experience that trying to get Bucky back on a topic after he’s left it is like catching a bar of soap in the bath and shrugs at Sam.

“O-kay,” Sam says. “So his... pelt. Wait, in the war, if he didn’t have it, how did you find it now? Was it with his relatives? Were they just passing that thing down along with great-grandma’s first flannel underpants?”

“Tracking it down was a hell and a half,” Steve admits. “It was in a storage locker in Sheepshead Bay. His dad kept it until he passed, and then his sister had it, and then her son put it with a bunch of other stuff in storage when he left Brooklyn. The kid’s a marine biologist at a research station in Antarctica, so I barely got ahold of him, and there was no way to get the key, so… I kind of broke in. He understands, though. Or… he will. When I tell him.”

“So, what, you called the guy up and said, great news! Uncle Buck is alive, and by the way, where did you stick his skin?”

Steve rubs his nose. “Natasha might’ve… hacked his bank statements.”

“I thought you said you got ahold of him!”

“I, well, I got his cell phone number, which got me his voicemail, and - look, it was an emergency. I left another voicemail after and apologized.”

“Did he get back to you _at all?”_

“Not yet,” Steve admits stiffly. “He’s probably very busy. He’s a research scientist.”

“So he’s taking penguin snot samples in Antarctica, great,” Sam says. “You need to buy him an apology gift, Steve, seriously.”

“I’m _gonna,”_ Steve says guiltily.

Bucky, who had switched to critically examining a rock by holding it three inches from his nose, pops upright. “Penguin?”

“Your nephew studies them,” Steve says.

“Oh.” Bucky goes back to his rock. He’s made no mention of seeing his family, or seeing if there _is_ family to see. The little Barnes colony of Brooklyn selkies appears to have dissolved into the world, into San Diego and County Cork and Antarctica. Probably they had to. Bucky’d gotten famous, as Sergeant Barnes from Brooklyn, and the Barneses must have decided that level of attention wasn’t something they could encourage when they needed to pop off for a swim.

A few weeks after being woken in 2011 Steve hiked out to the little stretch of beach they used to frequent, a rocky little strip at the corner of Marine Park **,** and he’s not sure what he expected but the emptiness hit hard anyway. Mrs. Barnes used to take Steve with them on their beach trips, along with Bucky’s sisters and endless reams of cousins. Not all of them had been selkies; Bucky’s dad had sisters and brothers too, and they had kids of their own. They’d treated Steve like one of them, though probably, Steve privately suspects, because when you are wrangling fifteen-odd children with various levels of familial claim you just call them all “dear” and hope for the best.

“So when we get back, you and I will do some nice apology shopping,” Sam says. Behind him, Bucky has abandoned his tide pool and progressed to scooting around on his back, his knees bent and propelling himself with his feet. “In the meantime, you _gotta_ tell me how you two met.”

“Steve found me in a sewer,” Bucky says, as he goes scooting past.

Sam twists around to look at him. “He what?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I heard all these noises coming from a drain one day, and I thought a dog got stuck under there or something, and when I got the drain cover up there he was.”

“What, a whole fucking seal?”

“He was a lot smaller when we were kids,” Steve says. “I put him in my wagon -” yeah, that sounds right, Tony’s always making references “- and pulled him down to the beach, and I thought that was that, but the bastard just rolls right over in the surf and turns human and goes hi, what’s your name?”

“What? What fucking beach? In _New York?”_ Sam demands. “You expect me to believe you didn’t get everybody and their mother freaking out around you when you pulled your sealskin stunt?”

“Nah.” Bucky arrives at the slope of a dune, rolls onto his side, rips up a chunk of the weedy sand grass and starts using it to scratch vigorously at his chest. “People at Coney Island have seen weirder.”

“Most of Brooklyn’s seen weirder too,” Steve says.

 _“Have_ they,” Sam says. “How you gonna explain how you ended up in a _storm drain?”_

Bucky comes scooting back the other way, still scrubbing himself with the grass. “You know how there were alligators from people flushing them down the pipes? Well, when I was a baby my ma was doing her hair one morning over the sink and lost her grip.”

Sam looks from one of them to the other. “That’s what you’re going with?”

“Selkie babies are very slippery,” Steve says gravely.

“Seriously,” Sam says.

“Oh yeah. Buck spent the first ten years of his life looking like a greased football.”

“Your selkie mother,” Sam says to Bucky. “Doing her selkie hair. Over the selkie sink.”

“We were on legs half the time,” Bucky says. “She had a job and everything.”

“And your greasy football ass just fell down into the pipes? That were for some reason connected to the storm drains? What were you, the size of a gumball?”

“It was a really big drain,” Steve says earnestly, but Bucky breaks then and dissolves into hoarse honking laughter. “Come on! We almost had him!” Steve protests.

“You absolutely one thousand percent did not,” Sam says. “Seriously? A _drain?_ At least say you swam up the outflow pipe or something.”

“We appreciate your feedback,” Steve says, and Sam flicks him on the arm.

“Our story will be better next time,” Bucky says, but distractedly. Having scooted his way back to the tide pool, he plunges his arm in up to the shoulder, rummages around in there and extracts an urchiny-looking thing that resembles a clump of purple spikes. He makes a triumphant noise, gives the hapless creature a flourish and starts furiously scrubbing it against his leg.

“Barnes,” Sam says, in dread tones, “What the god-fearing fuck are you doing.”

“I’m _itchy.”_

Steve sighs. “Buck, quit molesting the locals.”

“It’s fine,” Bucky grunts. “I’m not hurting it. I’m practically doing it a favor. Selkies are good luck.”

“That’s rabbit’s feet you’re thinking of,” Steve says.

“You saying I’m not good luck, Rogers?”

“Not for that sea urchin, no,” Steve says. “Do me a favor and don’t eat that one, okay? Either use it as a loofah or eat it but not both. That’s just too much for one creature to bear.”

“I wasn’t _gonna,”_ Bucky says sullenly, but he does stop eyeing the luckless urchin like it’s the last martini olive in the jar.

Sam is still staring at Bucky’s scrubbing efforts with open horror. “You eat those?” he demands. “It’s just a ball of spikes!”

“It’s tasty _inside,”_ Bucky says.

“And you want to eat it?” Sam says. “Are you serious? Jesus. This is like if I scratched my ass with a hotdog and then put it back in the bun.”

“I’m _not gonna eat this one,”_ Bucky growls. He makes to toss the urchin over his shoulder, but then he catches Steve’s eye and carefully lowers it back into the pool.

Sam readjusts his sunglasses. “So you - oh jesus, is he _licking that?”_

Steve glances back at Bucky, who has replaced the urchin with a gnarled bundle of seaweed and is indeed mouthing at it for taste. Steve just sighs, because how they _actually_ met was Steve was looking for shells on Coney Island beach, wandered under the piers, and found Bucky under there scraping barnacles off the wooden pillars and eating them like popcorn. Bucky’s complete lack of squeamishness was the direct cause of a _lot_ of incredibly unsanitary schoolyard dares, as their entire male cohort of classmates made valiant attempts at one-upmanship and failed miserably in the face of Bucky’s ability to crunch down live snails with every sign of enjoyment. “Unfortunately, that is not even the hundredth worst thing he’s ever put his mouth on.”

“Yeah, numbers one through ten are probably all you,” Sam says, then grins with brilliant white teeth when Steve glares. “And you ain’t getting out of telling me how you met, Steven, don’t think I don’t see you evading. Spill.”

Steve has to sigh again, because the full story of their encounter - and why Bucky decided to stick around afterward - is kind of a whole… situation. But it’s Sam, so. Steve briefly rubs the bridge of his nose and decides he might as well. “Bucky thought I was a witch.”

Sam stares, his lips slowly compressing and his eyes widening behind his sunglasses. “A _witch,”_ he says, strangled. “A _witch?”_

Steve sighs again. “Yes.”

“Oh, my god,” Sam says rapturously. “This is amazing. This is the best thing I’ve ever heard. Were you going around in all black? Were you in a Brooklyn’s Littlest Undertaker costume? Were you the OG Great Depression goth?”

“No, I looked _normal,”_ Steve says. “But then Bucky saw me draw, and -”

“So I didn’t know the word for _artist,”_ Bucky complains, twisting around just enough to show them he’s rolling his eyes.

“But you just think that’s a special type of witch,” Steve points out, mostly for Sam’s benefit.

Bucky resettles by the edge of the tide pool, spitting hair out of his face. “Relax. I know it all works by science.”

Steve sighs again. “Buck, you think magic _is_ science.”

Sam stares at Bucky. “You think _Steve_ is magic? Barnes, you _turn into a seal.”_

“That’s just genetics,” Bucky says dismissively. “What you are isn’t the same as what you _do.”_

“I’ve given up trying to follow the logic,” Steve tells Sam wearily. “When humans make things, apparently, that’s magic.”

Sam looks from one of them to the other. “Well,” he says. “I mean, I guess it’s true when they say any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...”

 _“Crayons_ aren’t _sufficiently advanced technology,”_ Steve says. “We met when I was _nine._ Believe me, I was not Picasso.”

“The crayons aren’t magic,” Bucky says, with the confidence of someone who has licked them all and made sure. He’s a little muffled since now he’s directly facedown in the sand. “Or the pencils. Or the paint. Or the paper.”

“Or _me,”_ Steve says, despite them having had this exact same argument approximately nine thousand times and ending the same way, every one.

Bucky raises his head again, sand covering his wet cheek. He fixes Steve with a doleful look that says _I understand if you can’t tell me your magic secrets for some wizardly reason, but I find it very hurtful when you pretend I’m stupid._ “Why can’t you tell Sam? He flies, he has it too.”

“I can’t tell Sam about my wizard powers,” Steve says, “because they don’t exist.”

Sam looks like God himself just opened up the sky and personally dumped a million dollars into his lap. “It’s okay, Steve,” he says, in an only slightly strangled voice. “He’s right. We’re all in the know here, right? Barnes, my kinda magic is called _pararescue._ We save people and fly.”

 _“Sam,”_ Steve protests, as Bucky rears up with wide eyes and gives Steve a triumphant look. Steve doesn’t know how to explain to Sam that Buck still thinks World War Two was the human equivalent of a really _big_ sexual dominance fight because “America” didn’t want “Germany” to have a bigger harem. “You can’t just _tell him that.”_

“Yes you can,” Bucky says eagerly. “Tell me more!”

“Not everybody can do it,” Sam says seriously. “You have to undergo many trials. But in the end, if you are worthy, you are given wings.”

“I remember,” Bucky breathes, rapt. Then his eyes widen and his face crumples up. “I broke them?”

“Aw, hey, it’s cool,” Sam says, and for all his ribbing he’s apparently not immune to the sight of Bucky’s composure gone wobbly. Steve’s not surprised. No one is. “I got a new pair from Stark. Better ones, even. So uh - we’re cool.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, still looking wobbly around the edges. “Steve, Sam needs presents too.”

“He’s right,” Sam says, looking relieved that the possibility of selkie tears is no longer on the table. “Sam needs presents every day. Hourly, even.”

“Steve is generous,” Bucky says, rolling back over. Steve catches sight of the small but deeply smug smile on Bucky’s face and feels dread strike into his heart. There’s definitely not even a hint of teariness, the bastard. There’s no doubt about whether _this_ is courting behavior.

“We’ll definitely, make sure Sam, gets his thank you,” Steve says, sounding very nearly all the way to normal. “After your molt. When we’re in the city.” That’ll give him some breathing room, at least. It’s not that Steve is, you know, _opposed,_ per se, it’s just, he needs to know what the plan is here. Getting a straight sensible answer out of Buck takes ten business days and a greased crowbar; Steve needs time to pry it out of him and actually finally have a straight-out talk. They don’t have any excuses like “there’s a war” or “I’m tired” or “I _already_ think I might be going to hell for being queer” anymore.

Sam stays the night but heads back to the city the next morning, because he’s got an actual social calendar with commitments. It’s for the best, really, because Buck’s mood curdles like yogurt the closer they get to the actual day of molt. He refuses to change until the last possible moment and spends a week going around looking like he has an increasingly bad case of sunburn. He gets patchy and red, then his face begins to peel, then his shoulders, then his hands and feet. His left arm is still shiny and mottled and doesn’t have any hair growing on it, so it doesn’t look all that different, but the rest of his skin starts trying to match.

Finally Steve has to step in, because this is the longest Buck’s held out so far and Steve’s starting to worry this might affect his health. “Come on, Buck. Wouldn’t it be better to get it over with? You look like a burn victim.”

Bucky glares venomously from where he’s dragging himself over the coarse straw carpet. “You’re not making me feel very beautiful, Steven.”

Steve sighs. Bucky makes absolutely zero effort to initiate anything or signal that he is sexually interested in any way, but he _does_ get upset if Steve doesn’t make advances regardless, so Steve has to play cock roulette every time he sets out to get some nookie. Bucky is also _the laziest partner on earth -_ seriously, Steve has no _idea_ how he spent time with girls because with _Steve_ he just immediately reverts to sexual protozoanism - and sleeping with him is pretty often like fucking a benevolently apathetic couch. He once asked Steve to _pass him a book_ while Steve was rubbing off on him. Half the time he doesn’t even _get hard._ But he sulks if Steve goes more than a day or two without paying _some_ kind of sexual attention, and now it’s been nearly three days because Steve, for some mysterious reason, has not been trying to fuck his partner who is constantly swearing under his breath and looks moderately boiled.

Steve holds in his sighs and sits down next to Bucky, who immediately climbs him and just as immediately hisses and climbs off. He dithers angrily for a few seconds, trying different positions, before ending up on his side on the floor, curled around Steve’s knee.

Steve bends down and kisses him on one peeling ear. Bucky makes a coffee grinder noise and curls harder around Steve’s leg. “Come on,” Steve murmurs. “You’ll feel better after.”

“Will you feed me fish,” Bucky says.

“Lots of fish.”

“Will you pour water on me.”

“As much as you want.”

“Will you sit with me.”

“As long as it takes,” Steve says, and Bucky makes some more percolating noises but finally heaves a sigh and levers himself up.

He undresses with all the joy of a man heading out to be hanged the next morning while Steve gets to gathering up everything they’ll need. He’d been preparing all along, bit by bit, and it’s mostly emptying the freezer into the cooler while Bucky swears under his breath. Steve managed to talk him out of getting piercings in all the available real estate of his face, and Bucky really only agreed because it would be a pain to remove every time he skinned; the end result is a whole jewelry store in both ears but blessedly no nose ring. Steve had to draw a line somewhere.

Now has to take them all out again. He removes them one by one, swearing all the while, then strides out onto the boardwalk, naked, still swearing, and by the time he hits the sand he’s a furiously chuffing pile of blubber. Steve follows at a more sedate pace. He’s got the deck chair, towels, pitcher, rubber brush, day tent and cooler full of fish to carry.  

-o-

Sam comes to visit again on day six. He’s got on big aviator sunglasses and is holding a cone of violently pink ice cream in one hand. He’s got a cooler of his own, a small one with a long plastic handle and wheels. He strolls towards their sad little camp by the rocks, where Steve knows objectively they have been for less than a week but also knows that his body is telling him it’s been several thousand years.

Bucky has his head buried in the bucket of clams, the beach echoing with the sound of industrial eating, and doesn’t see him come up. Probably for the best. Buck doesn’t even like ice cream that much but he does operate on the toddler toy principle, which is if somebody else is enjoying something near him, Buck needs to have some too.

“Sup,” Sam says, stopping a relatively safe distance away.

“Hey Sam,” Steve says. The last gravelly crunch dies away as Bucky shakes himself free of the bucket and rears up onto his fins. He spots Sam, tries to honk, starts hacking and coughs up a palm-sized chunk of clam shell.

“Wow,” Sam says. “I may never eat ever again ever. How’re you guys doing out here?”

“We’re getting by,” Steve says, reaching over and wiping clam fragments out of Bucky’s whiskers. “How’re you?”

Sam eyes the two of them. “Ready for more beach time, as long as I get to sit upwind.”

Bucky gargles belligerently at Sam, but once he falls over in Sam’s direction he loses steam and collapses dramatically the rest of the way instead. “Back at you, big guy,” Sam says without heat, coming closer and settling down beside Steve at the mouth of the tent. “You two really roughing it out here, huh.”

Steve scratches a little at his stubble and surveys their motley camp. He’s been sleeping in the tent, which kinda smells like it, and mostly wearing the same set of clothes, which definitely smell like it. Thank god for the naturally deodorizing properties of the sea breeze. “We’re getting close to nature,” he volunteers.

“Yeah, so close you’re gonna need a restraining order,” Sam says. ‘Can’t believe I ever thought this was an excuse for you two to go on actual vacation.”

He slurps his ice cream, and Bucky, hearing it, burbles again and waves one fin angrily in his direction. He doesn’t make any move to get up, though. “Sorry man,” Sam says, not sounding particularly so. “Dairy’s probably bad for you anyway.”

“He’s right,” Steve says, but pets a finger over the bridge of Bucky’s nose in consolation. Bucky licks morosely at Steve’s elbow and rouses himself enough to slouch into Steve’s  lap. Steve leans over to scoop up some icemelt from the cooler in a plastic cup and gently drizzles it over Bucky’s peeling back.

“Yikes,” Sam says, settling into his chair. He cracks open a can of beer one-handed and this time Bucky barely even opens an eye. “That really sucks for him, huh?”

“It’s kinda like a month of bad sunburn,” Steve says. Bucky usually likes his rubdowns with enough force to shake his blubber, but when molting he’s much more sensitive. Steve carefully strokes down his back and avoids the edges where his old pelt is peeling.

Sam considers the fraying jumbo loofah that is currently Bucky. “Can’t you just like… scrub it off? Maybe speed this along?”

“Can’t,” Steve says. “It’s not just the fur coming off, it’s the skin too. See? It has to detach on its own, or he might get tears. We’d do it if we could, trust me,” he adds. “Buck’s miserable like this.”

Bucky licks at Steve’s stomach and then rolls over, deflating in one giant weary sigh. Steve takes an anchovy out of the cooler and offers it. Bucky looks at it sadly, as if to say his woes are too great to be assuaged with mere fish, but after a couple seconds Steve watches instinct overtaken melodrama in his eyes and he snaps it up.

“How are you not scared of losing fingers,” Sam says, watching this.

“It’s not dangerous,” Steve says. Bucky, revitalized by the taste, noses at Steve’s hand. Steve goes for the cooler again and starts handing over more fish. “Buck’s never even nipped me.”

“Uh huh,” Sam says. “All I’m saying is maybe think about how you’re not the one that can regrow limbs here.”

“Well, with the serum, you never know,” Steve says, doling out more fish. “It’s not like we’ve had occasion to test.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Sam says, settling back again. “Christ. Anything else you do for fun out here?”

“We mostly nap,” Steve says. Buck, having slammed down the last of the fish, goes back to sucking moodily on Steve’s kneecap.

Sam watches this with the same kind of face he had when they watched that one documentary about parasitic flora. “Right,” he says. “Totally. Yeah, I can definitely see how unconsciousness would be the preferred state around here.”

Sam settles back with his beer. Steve closes his eyes in the sunshine, occasionally stroking Buck behind the ears. Buck dozes off, first into grunty snores that have Sam muttering a few things under his breath and then into a tranquil wheezy snooze.

Steve’s not sure how long it’s been when he stirs. It takes a second to determine what woke him. There’s the sound of tires on sand, an engine getting closer, and then it cuts out. A car door slams.

Steve opens his eyes. There’s a pickup parked nearby on the beach, closer to the water. A woman in a park ranger uniform is coming towards them.

Sam sits up straight next to Steve. He looks at her, then at Steve, then at Bucky, laid out in the sand like a giant animal rights violation. Steve also looks down at Bucky, whose head is still lodged across the entirety of his lap. “Oh wow,” Sam says. “Natasha is going to _cry_ laughing when she hears about this.” Then he says, “oh, shit,” and hurriedly stuffs his beer cans under his towel.

There’s not much Steve can do but wait until the ranger stops, a yard or two away. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” she says, in the strongest Canadian accent Steve’s ever heard. Between the bright hairband visible under her hat and her general expression she reminds Steve a lot of that Miss Williams who is always in the news for winning everything to do with tennis. “I’m Ranger Beaumont with the National Park Service. Could I ask you to move away from the seal, please?”

Steve briefly closes his eyes to question the entirety of his luck from start to finish, then opens them again. “Hello, ma’am,” he says. “I know what this looks like, but I’d just like to say that where he puts himself is not up to us.”

Ranger Beaumont’s gaze travels over their setup, from the tent to the empty fish bucket with its damning scraps of anchovy. Her glance definitely lingers on Sam’s hidden beer. “Nevertheless, sir,” she says. “I know they seem friendly, but it’s a wild animal. You’re not doing it any favors by feeding it.”

“That’s no wild animal,” Sam says, unable to help himself. “That’s the greediest New Yorker in the tristate area, and yes, I am counting the Trumps.”

Steve has to bite back a smile. He can’t deny it’s a little difficult to take things seriously with the sound of Bucky wheezing gently like a badly tuned harmonica in the background. Ranger Beaumont also does not appear to recognize that Steve is Captain America, which is of course what happens in the few situations where his off-duty fame could actually do some good.    

“Sir, I know this doesn’t seem like a serious situation to you, but feeding animals can have serious consequences,” Ranger Beaumont says severely. “If they get used to getting food from humans, and the next human they encounter doesn’t have any food for them, they may resort to aggressive behaviors. I’ve seen a sea lion bite a seven year old girl because people at the beach would feed it, and it thought she had food. The sea lion had to be put down and the girl needed eighteen stitches.”

“Ma’am,” Steve says, struggling, “I understand, and I’m not making light of the problem, it’s just -”

He breaks off, because it’s been six days out here with a sad speechless Bucky and showers have featured in none of them. “Look,” Steve says, “I recognize that this sounds insane, but he’s a selkie. He’d prove it to you, only he’s in the middle of a molt and changing right now would be really, really painful.”

Ranger Beaumont gives him a long, slow look, the one you might give the view out your windshield when you’ve taken the familiar final turn onto your home street and unexpectedly found yourself in Tajikistan. “You’re right,” she says. “That does sound insane.”

Steve raises his hands in a kind of helpless shrug. “I wouldn’t believe it either, but I’ve seen stranger these days,” he says, deciding he might as well play the Cap card and see what it can get. “I’ve taken time off Avengering to help him through it.”

That part isn’t strictly true - can’t take time off if you’re technically homeless and unemployed - but his ID certainly does say Steve Rogers and his Wikipedia picture is a pretty close match to the one on his license, if she decides to check. “He’s not lying,” Sam adds, because when push comes to shove he’s a true friend. “I’ve seen him change. Wish I’d taken video.”

Ranger Beaumont gives him another look that says reality has fifteen seconds to rearrange itself into something resembling sense before she starts resorting to drastic measures. “Sir,” she starts, just as Bucky comes awake with an enormous wet snort.

Bucky’s situational assessment skills are sometimes pretty impressive even when he’s a seal. He takes one look at Ranger Beaumont, deduces she is not a bringer of fish and in fact very much the opposite, and goes from comatose to crazed in half a second. _“Sir,”_ Ranger Beaumont says, jerking forward as Bucky knocks Steve over, heaves himself on top and starts yelling. Steve wheezes at the pressure on his ribs and grabs at Buck’s voluminous sides. “She’s just doing her job, Buck,” he tries, but Bucky just snaps his teeth and barks something Steve _knows_ is a swear word.

“Buck! Come on,” Steve says, wrapping his arms as much as he can around Buck’s middle, which isn’t exactly far. Bucky subsides into evil gargling. “Sorry,” Steve says, craning his head to look at Ranger Beaumont. “He gets shouty when he’s molting.”

“Does he,” Ranger Beaumont says, still looking like she’s braced to tackle Bucky and judo-flip him off of Steve. “Is this why you think he’s a selkie?”

Bucky gives a resounding snort that announces to everyone that he _will_ be lodging a complaint with the manager. Steve cranes his head up and tries his best to look reasonable and sane to Ranger Beaumont while sprawled under almost a thousand pounds of molting blubber. “Look - ma’am, are you familiar with Morse code?”

Ranger Beaumont narrows her eyes, still braced. “Yes,” she says. “I am.”

“Great. Perfect. He can prove he’s a selkie.”

Ranger Beaumont’s eyes narrow further. “Are you telling me he’s going to… what, slap out a message?”

Sam makes a noise like all his dreams are coming true. Steve sighs his deepest sigh yet. “Yes,” he says. “Ask him a question. He’ll answer it.” He nudges Bucky in the belly with his knee. “C’mon, Buck.”

Ranger Beaumont gives him a look that says she spends all day trying to stop teenagers from fucking, fighting or lighting fires in the woods and that her day had already been chock full of nonsense before _he_ came along. The look also says, however, that there are not enough hours in the day nor enough money in the world for her to escalate this if there’s a chance it doesn’t have to be escalated.

She looks at Bucky. With a certain weary resignation, she holds up four fingers and asks, “What number am I holding up?”

Steve nudges Bucky again. Bucky swings his head around, tries to glare at Steve, ends up glaring at his own pudge, and swings his head back to Ranger Beaumont. His nostrils flare. He raises a fin, and slaps out -

“Bucky!” Steve says. “That’s rude!”

Ranger Beaumont’s eyebrows have disappeared under the brim of her hat. “Well,” she says. “That’s not the first time an animal has told me to fuck off, but it is the first time one has spelled it.”

Bucky glowers at her unrepentantly. Despite being the size of a small car and radiating offense, he never quite manages to look more threatening than a roll of wet carpet. Ranger Beaumont certainly doesn’t bat an eye. “So… you’re a selkie,” she says.

Bucky sticks out his tongue and blows a raspberry that sounds like a whoopee cushion going off at the bottom of a well. Sam chokes back a laugh. “I really am sorry, ma’am,” Steve says, because he really wants this encounter to end without tranq darts. “I swear he’s got manners.”

“Mm. Of course, maybe you just trained him to spell that, and that’s the only Morse he knows,” Ranger Beaumont says thoughtfully. “He didn’t prove he understood me.”

Bucky rears up again, snorts in wet disgust and slaps out _S T E V E  C A N T  S P E L L._

There’s another pause. “Well,” Ranger Beaumont says. “I suppose that answers that.”

Bucky rolls off Steve, pointedly turns around - this takes a while, because a seal trying to do an about face is like a haybale trying to do ballet - and scoots a few yards down the beach, where he settles with his back quite pointedly to them and gives a snort that announces he is washing his fins of the matter. Ranger Beaumont watches him go thoughtfully, then casts her gimlet eye back to Steve, who tries to wheeze with dignity. “Do you donate to environmental causes, Captain Rogers?”

Looks like she did know who he was all along. “I do,” Steve says, trying to discreetly massage his ribs.  

“Keep it up. Specifically, Napeague State Park could use some trail restoration funds, and we’re always short of money to put up KEEP AWAY FROM THE WILDLIFE signs.” She levels a forbidding look at him, then at Sam. “There never proves to be enough of them.”

“Yes ma’am,” Sam and Steve chorus.

“Good. Now give me that beer.”

Sam guiltily pulls the last remaining can of beer from under the towel and passes it up. Ranger Beaumont holds it up to see the label, then pops the tab, tilts her head back and drinks.

It’s a pretty long drink. There isn’t anything so crass as glugging noises, but the drink is being drunk nonetheless. Steve watches several expressions cross over Sam’s face before he finally decides to settle on respect.

It’s been nearly a minute when Ranger Beaumont brings the can down empty and wipes the back of her mouth. “Next time, pick a more secluded beach to occupy,” she says, pocketing the can. “And make sure to clean up _all_ of your litter. Not every ranger is as cuddly and understanding as I am.”

They watch her walk back to her truck, get in and drive off.

“Did she say ‘god damned superheroes’? when she was walking away?” Sam says. “Or was that just me?”

“Wasn’t just you,” Steve says.

“Damn,” Sam says. “You’d think saving the world would entitle you to a little day drinking.”

Several yards away, Bucky seems to have fallen asleep again.

-o-

And then Steve wakes up one day next to a Bucky who is disheveled, encrusted with salt and pink all over. He’s planted face-first into the hummock of sand created by Steve’s bedroll, his limbs sprawled out like he changed over in his sleep. He’s in his halfway skin, his back dappled in a way that could be called freckles if freckles were the size of spoon backs and matched the spots on his seal-self skin. He blinks awake as Steve watches, raising his head a little and sneezing out some sand.

“Hey,” Steve says. “Happy late birthday.”

Bucky sits upright with that new abruptness, sand cascading off him. “Mmmy birrrrthdayyy?” he says, then grimaces and shakes himself like a dog. The pelt comes loose around him, rippling down to flop around his hips. Bucky works his jaw a little to get a feel for his talking teeth. “My late birthday,” he repeats, no longer sounding like he’s talking through a mouthful of rocks. “We do that. Right? Because I always - ”

“Because you’re always molting on your birthday, yeah,” Steve says.

Bucky looks pleased even as his face crinkles up in thought. Remembering, maybe. Then he looks Steve up and down and then all around him. “Where’s my present?”

Steve grins. Definitely remembering. “I thought we’d take a trip,” he says. “There’s a place called the Diego Ramirez islands. It’s the southernmost tip of the Americas, in Chile. And they’ve got - ”

 _“No,”_ Bucky says, round-eyed.

“Yep,” Steve says.

“I’m gonna... ” Bucky trails off, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the idea.

“You’re gonna,” Steve agrees.

_“I’m gonna eat a penguin.”_

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, I encourage you to donate to [Conservation International](https://www.conservation.org/Pages/default.aspx) or the [Environmental Defense Fund.](https://www.edf.org) Both organizations do legal advocacy and implement policy change that stabilize and repair damaged and at-risk ecosystems. 
> 
> If you’d like to donate directly to seals, the [Seal Conservation Society](https://www.pinnipeds.org) works internationally to support conservation efforts. You can specify which project/species you want your donation to go to, and I suggest contribution to the monk seal, aka the most endangered seal species. Less than 1,200 Hawaiian monk seals are alive in the wild. The Mediterranean monk seal population is estimated to be less than 700.
> 
> Any amount will help! And just look at this face: 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> (if you can't donate, don't feel bad! we're all doing what we can.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] teach your man to fish](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14217180) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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